Showing blog posts by Tula Connell

About Tula Connell

I got my first union card while I worked my way through college as a banquet bartender for the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee (we were represented by a hotel and restaurant local union—the names of the national unions were different then than they are now). With a background in journalism—covering bull roping in Texas and school boards in Virginia—I started working in the labor movement in 1991. Beginning as a writer for SEIU (and OPEIU member), I now blog under the title of AFL-CIO managing editor.

The nation’s governors are meeting right now in Washington, D.C., for their annual conference. Well, not all of them. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is a no-show, preferring to make the rounds on the weekend television interview programs to explain away why he wants to take away the freedom of public employees to bargain for good middle-class jobs.

On a snowy Wisconsin Saturday over 100,000 union members, working families, community members, faith leaders, activist groups and concerned citizens gathered in Madison to tell Gov. Walker to stop the attacks on the middle class and kill the bill.

This is a ground report from Wiscsonsin by Harvey J. Kaye, crossposted from New Deal 2.0. Kaye is the Rosenberg Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. A member of the National Writers Union/UAW, he is currently writing The Four Freedoms and the Promise of America. Follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HarveyJKaye.

The battle to preserve workers’ rights in Wisconsin is a watershed moment in US history. Wisconsin is Class War Ground Zero for the new millennium and a crucible for people’s rights in the United States.

Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich, like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, is willing to cost state taxpayers millions in lost revenue solely to advance their personal political vendetta against working families and their right to bargain for good middle-class jobs.

If true, this is a really horrifying development. According to Adam Weinstein at Mother Jones, when the magazine’s staffers tweeted a report that riot police might soon sweep workers out of the Wisconsin Capitol building,